The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  I stand listening to the rise and fall of their voices, to the petulance in Mamie’s, the eagerness in McHabe’s.

  “Jennie is your ward, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, Jennie. Yes. For another year.”

  “Then she’ll listen to you, even if your mother … the decision is yours. And hers.”

  “I guess so. But I want to think about it. I need more information.”

  “I’ll tell you anything you ask.”

  “Will you? Are you married, Dr. Thomas McHabe?”

  Silence. Then his voice, different. “Don’t do that.”

  “Are you sure? Are you really sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Really, really sure? That you want me to stop?”

  I cross the kitchen, hitting my knee against an unseen chair. In the open doorway a sky full of stars moves into view through the termite hole in the wall.

  “Ow!”

  “I said to stop it, Mrs. Wilson. Now please think about what I said about Jennie. I’ll come back tomorrow morning and you can—”

  “You can go straight to hell!” Mamie shouts. And then, in a different voice, strangely calm, “Is it because I’m diseased? And you’re not? And Jennie is not?”

  “No. I swear it, no. But I didn’t come here for this.”

  “No,” Mamie says in that same chill voice, and I realize that I have never heard it from her before, never. “You came to help us. To bring a cure. To bring the Outside. But not for everybody. Only for the few who aren’t too far gone, who aren’t too ugly—who you can use.”

  “It isn’t like that—”

  “A few who you can rescue. Leaving all the rest of us here to rot, like we did before.”

  “In time, research on the—”

  “Time! What do you think time matters Inside? Time matters shit here! Time only matters when someone like you comes in from the Outside, showing off your healthy skin and making it even worse than it was before with your new whole clothing and your working wristwatch and your shiny hair and your … your…” She is sobbing. I step into the room.

  “All right, Mamie. All right.”

  Neither of them reacts to seeing me. McHabe just stands there until I wave him towards the door and he goes, not saying a word. I put my arms around Mamie and she leans against my breast and cries. My daughter. Even through my coat I feet the thick ropy skin of her cheek pressing against me, and all I can think of is that I never noticed at all that McHabe wears a wristwatch.

  Late that night, after Mamie has fallen into damp exhausted sleep and I have lain awake tossing for hours, Rachel creeps into our room to say that Jennie and Hal Stevenson have both been injected with an experimental disease cure by Tom McHabe. She’s cold and trembling, defiant in her fear, afraid of all their terrible defiance. I hold her until she, too, sleeps, and I remember Jack Stevenson as a young man, classroom lights glossy on his thick hair, spiritedly arguing in favor of the sacrifice of one civilization for another.

  * * *

  Mamie leaves the barracks early the next morning. Her eyelids are still swollen and shiny from last night’s crying. I guess that she’s going to hunt up Peter, and I say nothing. We sit at the table, Rachel and I, eating our oatmeal, not looking at each other. It’s an effort to even lift the spoon. Mamie is gone a long time.

  Later, I picture it. Later, when Jennie and Hal and McHabe have come and gone, I can’t stop picturing it: Mamie walking with her swollen eyelids down the muddy streets between the barracks, across the unpaved squares with their corner vegetable gardens of rickety bean poles and the yellow-green tops of carrots. Past the depositories with their donated Chinese and Japanese and Korean wool and wood stoves and sheets of alloys and unguarded medicines. Past the chicken runs and goat pens. Past Central Administration, that dusty cinder-block building where people stopped keeping records maybe a decade ago because why would you need to prove you’d been born or had changed barracks? Past the last of the communal wells, reaching deep into a common and plentiful water table. Mamie walking, until she reaches the Rim, and is stopped, and says what she came to say.

  They come a few hours later, dressed in full sani-suits and armed with automatic weapons that don’t look American-made. I can see their faces through the clear shatter-proof plastic of their helmets. Three of them stare frankly at my face, at Rachel’s, at Hal Stevenson’s hands. The other two won’t look directly at any of us, as if viruses could be transmitted over locked gazes.

  They grab Tom McHabe from his chair at the kitchen table, pulling him up so hard he stumbles, and throw him against the wall. They are gentler with Rachel and Hal. One of them stares curiously at Jennie, frozen on the opposite side of the table. They don’t let McHabe make any of the passionate explanations he had been trying to make to me. When he tries, the leader hits him across the face.

  Rachel—Rachel—throws herself at the man. She wraps her strong young arms and legs around him from behind, screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!” The man shrugs her off like a fly. A second soldier pushes her into a chair. When he looks at her face he shudders. Rachel goes on yelling, sound without words.

  Jennie doesn’t even scream. She dives across the table and clings to McHabe’s shoulder, and whatever is on her face is hidden by the fall of her yellow hair.

  “Shut you fucking ‘doctors’ down once and for all!” the leader yells, over Rachel’s noise. The words come through his helmet as clearly as if he weren’t wearing one. “Think you can just go on coming Inside and Outside and diseasing us all?”

  “I—” McHabe says.

  “Fuck it!” the leader says, and shoots him.

  McHabe slumps against the wall. Jennie grabs him, desperately trying to haul him upright again. The soldier fires again. The bullet hits Jennie’s wrist, shattering the bone. A third shot, and McHabe slides to the floor.

  The soldiers leave. There is little blood, only two small holes where the bullets went in and stayed in. We didn’t know, Inside, that they have guns like that now. We didn’t know bullets could do that. We didn’t know.

  * * *

  “You did it,” Rachel says.

  “I did it for you,” Mamie says. “I did!” They stand across the kitchen from each other, Mamie pinned against the door she just closed behind her when she finally came home, Rachel standing in front of the wall where Tom died. Jennie lies sedated in the bedroom. Hal Stevenson, his young face anguished because he had been useless against five armed soldiers, had run for the doctor who lived in Barracks J, who had been found setting the leg of a goat.

  “You did it. You.” Her voice is dull, heavy. Scream, I want to say. Rachel, scream.

  “I did it so you would be safe!”

  “You did it so I would be trapped Inside. Like you.”

  “You never thought it was a trap!” Mamie cries. “You were the one who was happy here!”

  “And you never will be. Never. Not here, not anyplace else.”

  I close my eyes, to not see the terrible maturity on my Rachel’s face. But the next moment she’s a child again, pushing past me to the bedroom with a furious sob, slamming the door behind her.

  I face Mamie. “Why?”

  But she doesn’t answer. And I see that it doesn’t matter; I wouldn’t have believed her anyway. Her mind is not her own. It is depressed, ill. I have to believe that now. She’s my daughter, and her mind has been affected by the ugly ropes of skin that disfigure her. She is the victim of disease, and nothing she says can change anything at all.

  * * *

  It’s almost morning. Rachel stands in the narrow aisle between the bed and the wall, folding clothes. The bedspread still bears the imprint of Jennie’s sleeping shape; Jennie herself was carried by Hal Stevenson to her own barracks, where she won’t have to see Mamie when she wakes up. On the crude shelf beside Rachel the oil lamp burns, throwing shadows on the newly-whole wall that smells of termite exterminator.

  She ha
s few enough clothes to pack. A pair of blue tights, old and clumsily darned; a sweater with pulled threads; two more pairs of socks; her other skirt, the one she wore to the Block dance. Everything else she already has on.

  “Rachel,” I say. She doesn’t answer, but I see what silence costs her. Even such a small defiance, even now. Yet she is going. Using McHabe’s contacts to go Outside, leaving to find the underground medical research outfit. If they have developed the next stage of the cure, the one for people already disfigured, she will take it. Perhaps even if they have not. And as she goes, she will contaminate as much as she can with her disease, depressive and nonaggressive. Communicable.

  She thinks she has to go. Because of Jennie, because of Mamie, because of McHabe. She is sixteen years old, and she believes—even growing up Inside, she believes this—that she must do something. Even if it is the wrong thing. To do the wrong thing, she has decided, is better than to do nothing.

  She has no real idea of Outside. She has never watched television, never stood in a bread line, never seen a crack den or a slasher movie. She cannot define napalm, or political torture, or neutron bomb, or gang rape. To her, Mamie, with her confused and self-justifying fear, represents the height of cruelty and betrayal; Peter, with his shambling embarrassed lewdness, the epitome of danger; the theft of a chicken, the last word in criminality. She has never heard of Auschwitz, Cawnpore, the Inquisition, gladiatorial games, Nat Turner, Pol Pot, Stalingrad, Ted Bundy, Hiroshima, My-Lai, Wounded Knee, Babi Yar, Bloody Sunday, Dresden or Dachau. Raised with a kind of mental inertia, she knows nothing of the savage inertia of destruction, that once set in motion a civilization is as hard to stop as a disease.

  I don’t think she can find the underground researchers, no matter how much McHabe told her. I don’t think her passage Outside will spread enough infection to make any difference at all. I don’t think it’s possible that she can get very far before she is picked up and either returned Inside or killed. She cannot change the world. It’s too old, too entrenched, too vicious, too there. She will fail. There is no force stronger than destructive inertia.

  I get my things ready to go with her.

  GREG EGAN

  Learning to Be Me

  Here’s another first-rate story by new Australian writer Greg Egan, this one a profoundly disturbing meditation on just what it means to be human.…

  Learning to Be Me

  GREG EGAN

  I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

  Microscopic spiders had woven a fine golden web through my brain, so that the jewel’s teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel’s thoughts were wrong, the teacher—faster than thought—rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.

  Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel could do it for me.

  I thought: if hearing that makes me feel strange and giddy, how must it make the jewel feel? Exactly the same, I reasoned; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel, it too reasons: “Exactly the same; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel…”

  And it too wonders—

  (I knew, because I wondered)

  —it too wonders whether it’s the real me, or whether in fact it’s only the jewel that’s learning to be me.

  * * *

  As a scornful twelve-year-old, I would have mocked such childish concerns. Everybody had the jewel, save the members of obscure religious sects, and dwelling upon the strangeness of it struck me as unbearably pretentious. The jewel was the jewel, a mundane fact of life, as ordinary as excrement. My friends and I told bad jokes about it, the same way we told bad jokes about sex, to prove to each other how blasé we were about the whole idea.

  Yet we weren’t quite as jaded and imperturbable as we pretended to be. One day when we were all loitering in the park, up to nothing in particular, one of the gang—whose name I’ve forgotten, but who has stuck in my mind as always being far too clever for his own good—asked each of us in turn: “Who are you? The jewel, or the real human?” We all replied, unthinkingly, indignantly—“The real human!” When the last of us had answered, he cackled and said, “Well, I’m not. I’m the jewel. So you can eat my shit, you losers, because you’ll all get flushed down the cosmic toilet—but me, I’m gonna live forever.”

  We beat him until he bled.

  * * *

  By the time I was fourteen, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that the jewel was scarcely mentioned in my teaching machine’s dull curriculum, I’d given the question a great deal more thought. The pedantically correct answer when asked “Are you the jewel or the human?” had to be “The human”—because only the human brain was physically able to reply. The jewel received input from the senses, but had no control over the body, and its intended reply coincided with what was actually said only because the device was a perfect imitation of the brain. To tell the outside world “I am the jewel”—with speech, with writing, or with any other method involving the body—was patently false (although to think it to oneself was not ruled out by this line of reasoning).

  However, in a broader sense, I decided that the question was simply misguided. So long as the jewel and the human brain shared the same sensory input, and so long as the teacher kept their thoughts in perfect step, there was only one person, one identity, one consciousness. This one person merely happened to have the (highly desirable) property that if either the jewel or the human brain were to be destroyed, he or she would survive unimpaired. People had always had two lungs and two kidneys, and for almost a century, many had lived with two hearts. This was the same: a matter of redundancy, a matter of robustness, no more.

  That was the year that my parents decided I was mature enough to be told that they had both undergone the switch—three years before. I pretended to take the news calmly, but I hated them passionately for not having told me at the time. They had disguised their stay in hospital with lies about a business trip overseas. For three years I had been living with jewel-heads, and they hadn’t even told me. It was exactly what I would have expected of them.

  “We didn’t seem any different to you, did we?” asked my mother.

  “No,” I said—truthfully, but burning with resentment nonetheless.

  “That’s why we didn’t tell you,” said my father. “If you’d known we’d switched, at the time, you might have imagined that we’d changed in some way. By waiting until now to tell you, we’ve made it easier for you to convince yourself that we’re still the same people we’ve always been.” He put an arm around me and squeezed me. I almost screamed out, “Don’t touch me!”, but I remembered in time that I’d convinced myself that the jewel was No Big Deal.

  I should have guessed that they’d done it, long before they confessed; after all, I’d known for years that most people underwent the switch in their early thirties. By then, it’s downhill for the organic brain, and it would be foolish to have the jewel mimic this decline. So, the nervous system is rewired; the reins of the body are handed over to the jewel, and the teacher is deactivated. For a week, the outward-bound impulses from the brain are compared with those from the jewel, but by this time the jewel is a perfect copy, and no differences are ever detected.

  The brain is removed, discarded, and replaced with a spongy tissue-cultured object, brain-shaped down to the level of the finest capillaries, but no more capable of thought than a lung or a kidney. This mock-brain removes exactly as much oxygen and glucose from the blood as the real thing, and faithfully performs a number of crude, essential biochemical functions. In time, like all flesh, it will perish and need to be rep
laced.

  The jewel, however, is immortal. Short of being dropped into a nuclear fireball, it will endure for a billion years.

  My parents were machines. My parents were gods. It was nothing special. I hated them.

  * * *

  When I was sixteen, I fell in love, and became a child again.

  Spending warm nights on the beach with Eva, I couldn’t believe that a mere machine could ever feel the way I did. I knew full well that if my jewel had been given control of my body, it would have spoken the very same words as I had, and executed with equal tenderness and clumsiness my every awkward caress—but I couldn’t accept that its inner life was as rich, as miraculous, as joyful as mine. Sex, however pleasant, I could accept as a purely mechanical function, but there was something between us (or so I believed) that had nothing to do with lust, nothing to do with words, nothing to do with any tangible action of our bodies that some spy in the sand dunes with parabolic microphone and infrared binoculars might have discerned. After we made love, we’d gaze up in silence at the handful of visible stars, our souls conjoined in a secret place that no crystalline computer could hope to reach in a billion years of striving. (If I’d said that to my sensible, smutty, twelve-year-old self, he would have laughed until he hemorrhaged.)

  I knew by then that the jewel’s “teacher” didn’t monitor every single neuron in the brain. That would have been impractical, both in terms of handling the data, and because of the sheer physical intrusion into the tissue. Someone-or-other’s theorem said that sampling certain critical neurons was almost as good as sampling the lot, and—given some very reasonable assumptions that nobody could disprove—bounds on the errors involved could be established with mathematical rigour.

  At first, I declared that within these errors, however small, lay the difference between brain and jewel, between human and machine, between love and its imitation. Eva, however, soon pointed out that it was absurd to make a radical, qualitative distinction on the basis of the sampling density; if the next model teacher sampled more neurons and halved the error rate, would its jewel then be “half-way” between “human” and “machine”? In theory—and eventually, in practice—the error rate could be made smaller than any number I cared to name. Did I really believe that a discrepancy of one in a billion made any difference at all—when every human being was permanently losing thousands of neurons every day, by natural attrition?